Fake: Songs of Utyosov and Dunayevsky Are Forbidden at Odesa Railway Station

On May 29, the Russian television channel Zvezda falsely reported that songs of Soviet composers Leonid Utyosov and Isaak Dunayevsky, which have traditionally greeted visitors arriving in Odesa, were to be forbidden and replaced with Ukrainian songs at the city’s railway station. The Russian site Pravda.ru also followed a similar line on May 29, adding: “The management of the railway station decided that their songs should not be played for…

On May 29, the Russian news agency TASS published a false report with the heading “The USA Has No Confirmations that Russia Moves Troops to the Border with Ukraine.” Its author, Dmitry Kirsanov, refers to a statement by U.S. State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke during a regular briefing. Rathke was quoted completely out of context. A journalist asked him specifically about a firing range in Kuzminsky, in the Rostov region.…

Deep inside a four-story marble building in St. Petersburg, hundreds of workers tap away at computers on the front lines of an information war, say those who have been inside. Known as “Kremlin trolls,” the men and women work 12-hour shifts around the clock, flooding the Internet with propaganda aimed at stamping President Vladimir Putin’s world vision on Russia, and the world. The Kremlin has always dabbled in propaganda, but…

Russia is at war with Ukraine. Russian citizens and soldiers are fighting and dying in a war of their government’s own making. Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to deny Russian involvement in the fighting, but the evidence is overwhelming and indisputable. Drawing upon open source information, Hiding in Plain Sight: Putin’s War in Ukraine provides irrefutable evidence of direct Russian military involvement in eastern Ukraine. This report, the result of…

An unusual investigation using publicly available videos, smartphone photographs and satellite images shows that Russia is continuing to defy the West by conducting protracted military operations inside Ukraine, according to an independent report. Russia has long dismissed Western allegations that its military has intervened in Ukraine as little more than computer-generated propaganda. In an attempt to puncture the Russian denials, independent experts have operated like digital Sherlock Holmeses, using Google’s…

A Russian court has ruled to block part of the website of RosKomSvoboda, a Russian Internet freedom and human rights organization, on the grounds that the page in question is an anonymizer—a tool that allows users to access content and websites that might be banned in Russia. The ruling is alarming because anonymizers and similar tools are not currently prohibited in Russia. The court decision was made on April 13,…

On May 27, RIA Novosti, Russia Today, Zvezda and other Russian media falsely reported that a meeting between the newly-elected Polish President Andrzej Duda and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko had been cancelled because of a new Ukrainian law that officially recognizes the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) of the Second World War. The information seems to be based solely on an article by Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski, who wrote: “Having signed the scandalous…

Russian opposition blogger Ruslan Leviev and his small team of investigators have released a new investigation into the deaths of three Russian soldiers who seem to have died during a battle in eastern Ukraine in May 2015 (English translations available here and here). The most striking evidence from the group included photographs of the gravesites of the three Russians who were active members of the 16th separate Spetsnaz (special forces)…

The Podrobnosti site has falsely reported that Carpatho-Russinians held a meeting on May 22 in Kiev. It ran with the headline “Carpatho-Russinians Require from Poroshenko a Status Similar to DPR.” The site claims that the group demanded that they be granted a special autonomous status and that a certain Andrey Yurik acted as one of the representatives of the movement. This in turn was spread by a number of Russian…

The television network Zvezda created a false story by taking an interview with Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin, out of context. It reported that the Ukrainian president was allowing all citizens to carry weapons, and this false information was then spread on social networks and other information sites. The original interview was with the Voice of Ukraine newspaper. During the interview, Shokin discussed the possibility of allowing citizens to have permits…